Goal to bridge cultures isn't lost in translation

Updated 6:12 pm, Thursday, August 16, 2012

Maria Baños Jordan, the executive director of the Texas Latino Leadership Roundtable of Montgomery County, works to integrate, engage and explain a surging Hispanic community.

Maria Baños Jordan, the executive director of the Texas Latino Leadership Roundtable of Montgomery County, works to integrate, engage and explain a surging Hispanic community.

Photo: Brett Coomer

Goal to bridge cultures isn't lost in translation

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On the surface, there's nothing extraordinary about this scene. A dozen or so leaders of this pine-locked colonia in Montgomery County are seated in an arc of folding chairs on a Saturday morning to talk drainage.

The lady with the county and some engineers, one Spanish-speaking, are explaining how a grant will help clean out and regrade their roads and ditches damaged after Hurricane Ike.

Look closer, though, and you see something more. Even five years ago, the drainage project couldn't have happened because the county wouldn't have known about the drainage problem. It wouldn't have known because it didn't communicate with the residents of Deerwood. And it didn't communicate because that's just the way it was between the mostly rural, English-speaking part of the county and the Hispanic newcomers who settled outside Cut-and-Shoot about 30 years ago and lived in the shadows ever since.

The project likely wouldn't have happened without the woman sitting in the corner, taking notes, and passing out bottled water during the drainage meeting: Maria Baños Jordan, a former social worker living in Kingwood who heads the Texas Latino Leadership Roundtable of Montgomery County.

"She's invaluable," county grants administrator Juanita Stanley tells me after the meeting. "I couldn't do it without her."

Jordan's group, started about two years ago, doesn't go to court like the League of United Latin American Citizens. It doesn't view the Hispanics as a market share the way a business group might. It's nonpartisan, with members across the political spectrum. Its only agenda is to help integrate, engage and explain a burgeoning population that now represents 21 percent of Montgomery County, up from 13 percent a decade ago.

Georgina Colunga, who moved to Deerwood 18 years ago, described what Jordan has meant to the colonia of several hundred families: "We started getting noticed, as a community, outside. That's the main idea," she told me Saturday. "We are here. We're not ghosts."

Jordan, the 43-year-old daughter of a Mexican mother and a Cuban father who moved as a girl from Houston's near Northside to the "dairy pastures" of Aldine, came to Montgomery County to work on a project for the United Way. But she quickly realized there was more to do: Local leaders seemed to be dealing with the influx of Hispanics by, in her view, ignoring it.

Short-sightedness

In some ways, Jordan says, Montgomery County was where Houston was in the mid-1980's in terms of its Hispanic growth. Latino professionals weren't organized or vocal. Today, while you can buy tortillas at the Shell station, the nonprofits and social services agencies don't have enough bilingual staffing.

An email Jordan got the other day from a local social service agency sought her help reaching out to Mexican-American families who seem "afraid to work with us."

"The language barrier is its own issue," the email said. "But when the therapy is not there that can help support them, we remain outsiders in their eyes. … I need information that addresses family interaction. I need to know how their culture impacts and influences their family functioning. Without trust, we cannot get to the root of the issues."

Jordan knows integration can take generations, but with the demographic shift Texas is experiencing, there is no time to lose. Montgomery County's Hispanic population has tripled in the past 20 years.

Jordan says no one in this conservative county has closed a door to her. Sometimes questions are telling, but she patiently answers them. Asked why today's immigrants don't learn English faster, she explains, "It's not for lack of wanting to. Most of our first-generations work two jobs. And even with that, I can tell you most of the ESL classes are filled to the brim." Asked why Hispanics don't vote, she explains it can be traced back to corruption in their native country or the fact that older generations simply weren't engaged politically here.

'The next Deerwood'

While she's trying to help non-Hispanic Montgomery County get comfortable with the idea of Hispanic growth, she's also trying to explain to new generations of Hispanics how vital it is they take leadership roles in their new country.

Jordan holds up Deerwood's successes as a model for other emerging communities across the rural county: "Every time I drive into Montgomery County," she says, "I drive by a few little neighborhoods, or a few little trailers and I say, 'There's the next Deerwood.' "